Puzzle

Introduction Wrecking Crew was developed by Nintendo R&D1, directed by Satoru Okada and produced by Gunpei Yokoi, with designer Yoshio Sakamoto building his first game after a stint as a pixel artist around a simple idea: a puzzle-action game about demolishing walls. It debuted as an arcade cabinet on the Nintendo VS. System in 1984…

Introduction Bomberman traces back to a 1983 original created by programmer Yuji Tanaka for Hudson Soft, a Sapporo-based company that had started out selling art supplies and telecommunications gear before moving into home computers and eventually games. This 1985 Famicom/NES version, reportedly ported single-handedly by Shinichi Nakamoto over a marathon 72-hour stretch, is widely considered…

Introduction Pac-Man’s NES history is unusually tangled for such a simple game. Namco’s original 1980 arcade maze-chase design was ported to the NES more than once: Tengen, then an Atari Games subsidiary, released a licensed version in October 1988 and later an unlicensed version after a falling-out with Nintendo over cartridge lockout chips and licensing…

Introduction Tetris was originally designed and programmed in June 1984 by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov, and its Western publishing rights became the subject of a famously tangled licensing battle in the years that followed, with Andromeda Software, Mirrorsoft, Atari Games subsidiary Tengen, and Nintendo all fighting over who actually held the console rights. Tengen…